Before I Was Afflicted I Went Astray

Last Sunday I had a conversation with a special woman of God. As we swapped stories of God’s amazing grace she said of my heartache, “This is keeping you on your knees.” Trials have a way of doing that. They keep us close to the cross. If you are facing a hardship today — painful though it may be, could it be that God has tucked you away in this hard place for your own spiritual safety?

Read this beautiful Puritan quote and ask God to open your heart to His amazing grace. The very thing that you think was designed to destroy you, could actually be God’s tool to heal you and make you whole.

“So long as men are in prosperity, and have their leaves on, they do not see what nests of sins and lust are in their hearts and lives; but when all their leaves are off, in the day of their affliction, then they see them and say, I did not think I had such nests of sin and lusts in my soul. … ‘Before I was afflicted I went astray,’ says David, Psa 119:67. And Job 36:10, ‘He openeth also their ear to discipline, and commandeth that they return from iniquity.’ Yea, these afflictions and sufferings of the saints not only reveal and heal their sins, but also put them upon the excerse of grace: ‘In their affliction (says God) they will seek me early,’ Hosea 5:15. Yea, they not only draw out their graces but reveal their graces too, which possibly they never too notice of before.”